The present disclosure generally relates to methods of preparing customized optical elements, and in particular customized ophthalmic elements, coating compositions for customized optical elements and customized optical elements made using the same. For example, various non-limiting embodiments disclosed herein relate to customized ophthalmic elements and methods of forming customized ophthalmic elements using thousands of points of refraction data (or “prescription information”) obtained from a patient's eyes using a wavefront aberrometer. More particularly, certain non-limiting embodiments relate to methods of forming customized ophthalmic elements using a variable index-coating into which index-change information has been written and customized ophthalmic elements so made.
The advent of wavefront aberrometer technology, which maps the optics of the eye over many thousands of points, has allowed for the development of new vision correction technologies that can utilize this digital prescription information. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,813,082, 6,781,681, 6,761,454 & WO 02/28272 which generally disclose systems and methods for using wavefront sensing to determine the objective refraction of a human eye. Until recently, the higher order aberrations could not be measured via conventional refraction equipment. However, commercial refractometers using wavefront aberrometer technology to measure higher order aberrations have been developed, and are now commonly used, for example, to guide laser eye surgery.
A wavefront aberrometer works by using a laser beam, or other light source, to generate a well defined, ordered array of light and dark points. The array of light and dark points is then directed into the patient's eye, and the reflected beam that has been distorted by all optical components of the eye is detected by a wavefront analyzer (a position sensitive device), which digitally maps out these distortions. The distorted array obtained from the patient's eye is compared to a distortion-free array (i.e., one that would be produced by a perfect lens). Using well-defined mathematics (Zernike polynomials), the position of each point in the array is located and the deviations of each point from that of a distortion-free array are calculated. Since these deviations provide information regarding the higher order aberrations of the patient's eye, using the deviation information, a prescription necessary to correct for higher order aberrations can be calculated.
Typical ophthalmic lenses, however, correct only for low order aberration such as tilt (prism), defocus (sphere), and astigmatism (cylinder). Higher order aberrations, such as coma, trefoil and secondary astigmatism, are usually not corrected since these aberrations tend to be patient-specific and current large-scale manufacturing techniques for ophthalmic lenses (such as casting and surfacing) are not well-suited to handle the required customization. Higher order aberrations are thought to correspond to about 20% of the vision correction required by most people. By correcting these higher order vision aberrations, better than 20/20 vision correction (or “supervision”) may be achievable.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide customized ophthalmic elements, which may be used to correct a variety of vision deficiencies, and methods of forming the same. Further, it would be advantageous to provide a method of forming a customized ophthalmic element by customizing a standard ophthalmic substrate, such as a standard single or multi-vision lens, a contact lens or lens blank, to create a customized lens that corrects higher order aberration(s). Still further, it would be advantageous to provide methods of forming customized ophthalmic elements that may be used to convert a standard ophthalmic substrate into a bi-focal, tri-focal or multi-focal lens, with or without higher order aberration correction.